The British GENES blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

So what's the problem? Well, errr, the year ranges don't make much sense! The wiki pages entries for each collection notes the sources to be FindmyPast. (The wiki pages are accessible from each of the search screen links noted above.) However, there are absolutely no entries for the period from 1800 to mid-1837 included - and that is because these are in fact the civil registration indexes for births, marriage and deaths, which did not commence until mid-1837. The cut off date respected for each database is indeed 1920 - but why?

The birth records wiki page notes that the father's name is included in the search results - it isn't from what I can see. It's the name, registration district, year, quarter, volume and page number only - as in other online presentations of the same indexes, including FindmyPast. With the marriage indexes, the prospective spouse's name is helpfully returned, and with death indexes the age at death is also included.

It's great to see the English and Welsh civil indexes freely available, despite the somewhat arbitrary 1920 cut off point - but somebody needs to look at the collection titles again!

NB: Images from the BMD index registers are not available on the site, only the transcribed data.

UPDATE Fri 10th: The collections have been renamed to start at 1837. Ahem...!

2 comments:

Alas - just been alerted to a major fail on this data. So far as I can see, many (i.e. probably all) the letters have been dropped from the volume numbers. So where FreeBMD has Volume 8b, the FS data just reads Volume 8. Given the district name, one can work out the correct volume - but why bother? Why not use FreeBMD?